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Monday, November 19, 2012

I'd never heard of the Charlie Bone series of YA books before coming across this in the library. The first book, translated as Charlie Bone and the Midnight Mystery, shows a great debt to Harry Potter--perhaps intentionally. Charlie is a young boy who discovers he has a strange ability inherited from his father and is sent away to a school for others of his kind. Instead of magic and Hogwarts, here we have "gifts" (everyone has a different one) and a school called Bloor. Charlie's particular talent is that, when he looks at a photograph, he can hear the people in it talking to each other as if it were a recording of the scene. Other students at the school have the ability to levitate, turn into a wolf, hypnotize students, and more. The plot of this first book in the series concerns Charlie's discovery that a fellow student has been hypnotized since early childhood into thinking she is someone other than who she really is; Charlie, of course, sets out to find a way to restore her rightful personality.

Overall, I have to say the book is kinda . . . "eh." It's okay, but not particularly memorable.